Overview

After sending a mailing a member reports that they received an email that indicates that their account has been put on "hold" because of messages bouncing. The message reads:

This email message is to notify you that your membership to LIST_NAME has been put on "hold".

This means that you will not receive mail from 'LIST_NAME'.

Your subscription has been held because at least 2 recent messages have been either bounced by your email system, or could not be delivered at all.

Your membership can be restored to "normal" by sending the command "unhold" to email@address.com 

Note that if your email address continues to reject mail your subscription will once again be "held".

You may want to contact the people responsible for your electronic mail to determine why your email address has been having trouble.

Solution

This situation occurs when a user reaches the Bounce Limit for the type of message being sent. By default, ListManager limits bounces for announcement and email marketing lists to 2. For discussion lists, the default setting is 5 bounces. If the Bounce Limit is set to 1, addresses that bounce will be put on hold after only one permanent delivery failure.

To resolve this issue you can Adjust the Bounce Limit, then follow the instructions in ListManager - Changing Members Status From Held to Normal. 

Adjust the Bounce Limit

1. Log on to Lyris LM as an Administrator
   
   
2. Navigate to Utilities > List Settings > Automatic Maintenance > Error Mail
   
   
3. Adjust the setting for Marketing and Discussion Lists as needed

After making the adjustment, new mailings will be subject to the Bounce Limits you set. Members who are held due to the previous settings will still be held. Follow the instructions in the ListManager - Changing Members Status From Held to Normal article to return them to normal.

Bounce Limit Recommended Settings

The lower the number, the more quickly bad email addresses will be set to held, and the greater chance that someone with transient server problems will be inadvertently held. If you want your members to be placed on hold if they bounce any messages at all, you can set this number to 1. Setting the Bounce Limit to 1 is strongly recommended if you are using old data with many bad email addresses.

Additional Details

• When analyzing the failed deliveries, ListManager counts only one bounce per day, per member, so an email address does not typically go on hold due to delivery problems on a single day.
• Failed send attempts are recorded in the lyrCompletedRecips table: a total of the number of bounces for an address is no longer contained in the members_ table.
• By default, ListManager will try to send a message three times—one initial send, and two retries
• If a mail server reports that an address is permanently non-deliverable, ListManager will only attempt to deliver to it once for that mailing. This kind of bounce is a permanent failure
• A message that is undeliverable for other reasons (e.g., mailbox is full or mail server does not respond) is a transient failure
• If an address is undeliverable for the initial send and all the retries, it is considered to have bounced once
• Even if a mail server initially accepts the message and later determines that the user does not exist, ListManager will be able to record that address as having bounced. In this situation, the receiving mail server will reply to ListManager with error mail. This error mail will go to the bounce email address and will contain the user’s unique member ID number, so ListManager will be able to track it back to the particular address unable to accept mail. This kind of bounce will not appear in delivery reports, as the mailserver initially reported that it accepted the message. Many large ISPs (e.g., AOL) accept all mail and bounce back undeliverables later.

Related Articles

• ListManager - Changing Members Status from Held to Normal